Yesterday evening I got fed up with a Firefox bug and decided to look for it on Bugzilla to see whether it had been reported. It was a very strange bug, involving the mis-display of transparent PNGs, and it only popped up in Windows, not under Linux. It turns out that the bug has already been reported. Moreover, someone already posted a comment with a proposed work-around involving shutting off some nVidia hardware acceleration and/or updating to the latest drivers. I used both of these solutions and found some really cool nVidia configuration options in the process, which was neat. (Multiple desktops under Windows, woohoo!)
While I was poking around with graphics driver and monitor configuration, I found a setting for DPI that I had never noticed before. I'm not interested in changing that setting for myself, but I thought it would be good for a few staff members at work. They used their LCD monitors at a lower, non-native resolution because they want big icons and text, but the low resolution was also causing some workflow issues. The DPI setting would solve that problem by effectively instituting a minimum font size. I got one of the PC techs to help the staff with those settings, and I think it worked out for them.
I was very happy to be finally able to solve that problem, because I had tried some time earlier and not been able to find a satisfactory configuration. It was frustrating to feel the limits of (proprietary) software; I'm used to doing whatever I want with my computer (or, failing that, knowing that the only limit is my own knowledge and skill). The computer is a slave; it should not place limits on what I can and cannot do.
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